Conrad Marca-Relli was born in Boston to Italian parents in 1913. Well-travelled and educated at the Cooper Union Institute in New York, he also served in the Army during World War II. In New York, Marca-Relli was a founding member of the Eighth Street Club along with other early primary figures of the Abstract Expressionist movement.

Marca-Relli believed abstraction should be emotionally moving, and he used psychologically affecting shapes and textures to evoke emotions. Marca-Relli took a constructive approach to image-making, building up surfaces by cutting out and applying shapes to canvas or metal supports. Marca-Relli is best-known for elevating the status of collage in art to its current status, where it now carries its own formal and emotive qualities.